What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 3
Joe takes in a few large gulps of air for his own reassurance. Yes, right at this moment he himself is still alive — what a miracle, although the young are for ever becoming the old, the living are for ever joining the dead. But then the shame comes over him again, the shame that he will have to have his vitality verified, will have to pay yet another visit to the doctor and learn his heart still beats because the doctor has listened to it.
Dolores Mercia Kelly, for all intentions Halifax, brings her Uncle Joe a cup of coffee. She comes into the room so quietly he is startled when she speaks. He takes the cup from her and sits in an armchair. His niece sits down with him, a study of solicitude and sympathy, but without coffee herself because Dolores never drinks anything containing caffeine. She prefers water from a transparent plastic bottle that she always carries with her. She sucks the liquid from a teat she sterilises daily — not that he’s ever seen her doing it, but what else is she doing every night with all that boiling water? Incredibly, Dolores has managed to find herself a boyfriend sprung from the same mould, a lanky youth with whitewashed skin and alarming eyes who carries not only his own water supply but also his own food rations.
Joe once opened Dave’s plastic food container when he found it momentarily neglected on a garden chair, discovered inside a mess of mixed grains doused with some black, sticky and salty substance, and shut the container quickly as if he’d discovered something degrading. Thoughts of degradation led naturally to thoughts of sex, and Joe stood in the garden wondering if his niece and her paramour ever fornicated. Probably they just lay one on top of the other for hours trying to avoid orgasm, a goal that should have become easier as the tedious time passed — boredom and sex have never been happy bedfellows.
Joe now studies his pale beanpole niece. Her knees are pressed tightly together as if they have been joined since birth, not that he ever wants them open, God forbid. He’s got enough to worry about without entering a state of prolonged joylessness with a girl who’s always reading out the lists of ingredients on the labels of food cans and bottles: oil of ram’s testicle, toasted stomach of locust, ground mad-cow vertebrae, tincture of sunset, agent orange.
Head down and virtually immobile, Dolores waits patiently until her uncle has finished his coffee. Joe feels like shaking her to see if she’s still alive. Then she says, ‘Can Dave move into the tool shed? He can’t keep up his rent since he lost his job.’
‘No, he bloody can’t,’ Joe replies. ‘What d’you think I’m running here, a madhouse?’
Dolores bows her head in apparent acquiescence, but it’s many years since Dolores acquiesced to anything — not since she learnt that the best way to control the world is to agree to everything but keep on doing what you want. Two days later she sweeps the wood shavings on the tool-shed floor into a neat pile, and Dave puts down his bedroll. Next she helps him lay out his utensils, his cup and bowl on a sawhorse, and reassures him, ‘Don’t worry, no one comes in here any more, not since my Grandfather died.’ They sit together quietly in the doorway of the shed, warming their pale skins and thin blood in the strong sunlight, the peacefulness interrupted only by their intermittent scratching.
‘We shouldn’t wear clothing at home any more,’ Dave declares. ‘It’s what gives us these rashes.’
Then hand in hand they go to pluck edible grasses amidst the broken glass and aluminium cans in empty lots. They have given up collecting the wild fennel and rosemary which flourish outside the public buildings on Jackson Street, scared off by the Council signs warning that the area has been weed sprayed.
‘Where’s your weird boyfriend living?’ Uncle Joe remembers to ask Dolores two or three weeks after his mother’s funeral. ‘Under a bridge somewhere?’
Dolores smiles to show she understands that this is a joke and serenely replies that he’s staying with a friend.
‘Well, that’s good,’ Uncle Joe retorts. ‘I hope they feed him up. He’ll be see-through soon.’
Dolores bends to pick up her uncle’s cleaned plate, a plate that only moments ago was heaped with steaming meat and fried carbohydrate, and as she does so she is overwhelmed by the sweetness of self-abnegation. She has bravely refused to submit to the regimen of slow poisoning dispensed indiscriminately by the modern world, and her leviathan hunger confirms her virtue, her moral superiority to the overfed omniphagous.
When Dave runs his hands over her naked skin he stubs his fingertips on her ribs and hip-bones — there’s no fat at all between her skin and her skeleton. And he is the same. Even his buttocks, which she cups in both hands as he lies on top of her, moaning over his failed erection, feel as if all the blubber has been melted down and pumped out. ‘Never mind,’ she whispers in his ear, ‘we don’t need to do that, that’s for them.’ She has lost all sexual interest; menstruation stopped quite some time ago; and she’s always eerily cold as if accompanied by a personal chilling wind. Really she’s glad to have this lanugo to keep her a little bit warm.
Dolores leaves the room to load the dishwasher and Joe turns on the television. Thank God for sport in a world full of nutters. Even if he’s a nutter himself, thank God for sport. But the whole time the cricket team is losing — and that’s a long time — Dolores is in the back of his mind, he’s picking the scab off an old feeling of guilt. His niece had been the one to accept the night-time onion around her neck, the chopped garlic sachet sewn inside her singlet — not that he ever gave her comfrey, not since the medical world declared its suspected connection to liver cancer. Valentina, on the other hand, had torn the offending vegetable off its string and thrown it at him, had screamed that his garlic juju would make her stink like a Greek, she wouldn’t eat sandwiches no matter what was in them, well maybe chocolate hail, she wouldn’t eat the worm pills, wouldn’t drink the vitamin syrup, wouldn’t stop stamping and refusing his ministrations, while her mother intermittently admonished, ‘Don’t go too far, darling, Daddy will get you Ritalin.’
But little Dolores gave up sweets and meat at twelve, caffeine drinks at fourteen, preservatives, colours and flavours a short while later, and no one tried to stop her. Soon the child had no energy and no fight, accepted what the world gave her with the same passivity with which she’d accepted the onion, and now look what’s happened. What life has given her is a reflection of herself, a reflection of herself with male equipage, and Dolores is fascinated, hypnotised — as we all are when our nemesis so resembles us.
Two weeks later, Joe Halifax, whose mind is still fixated on death, suddenly remembers that his gun is stored in the tool shed. He shouldn’t really leave it there, what with his brother’s two young nippers coming to stay for the weekend, he’ll shift it to the garage which can be locked. Joe goes out across the springy grass and opens the door of the shed. He’s surprised that it opens so easily — he’d have thought it would be sticking by now, no one’s opened it for donkey’s years. Joe steps inside the cool gloom and is startled by something moving across the floor in the darkness. He snaps on the light and Dolores’ boyfriend crawls back to his bed-rags, crouches there on the sackcloth blinking at the incursive light.
‘What are you doing in here?’ Joe shouts. ‘And where’s your bloody clothes?’
Dave smiles in a way that Joe considers unhinged. Joe slams the door and goes back to the house to call the police, but by the time they arrive Dave has vanished, as has his bedroll and his pile of fusty clothes, his utensils and mug and barmecide bowl.
Joe waits up to shout at Dolores, to fume at her, ‘Can’t you see he’s bonkers. What is this, some kind of folie à deux?’ But Dolores never arrives. At two in the morning Joe and Susan conclude that sixteen-year-old Dolores — only daughter of Joe’s youngest sister (deceased), entrusted to her uncle for upbringing and general protection, loved dutifully in spite of her obsessions and skin blemishes, loved a little less of late owing to her sores and halitosis, soul-mate cousin of Valentina, now tucked up in her own bed with her rosy cheek on her heart-shaped lavender-pillow — has run away with crazy Davie to reach for the stars from the roadside ditch.
3
They say everybody remembers what they were doing on the day President Kennedy died, but Valentina doesn’t even know who he was. It just goes to show how quickly the tragedies of one generation become the tedious content of history books for another. History has never been Valentina’s thing. Only now is relevant, and right now is the only when. Of course Valentina will always remember the moment when she first hears about the towers going down. On this particular morning she is in a cake shop on Jackson Street. It’s the kind that still sells custard squares and real-cream doughnuts, and the mad Irishwoman who tends the counter is crying and flamboyantly gesticulating as if all of Ireland has turned Protestant overnight, alternatively Catholic — Valentina doesn’t quite know what the problem is there. She backs out of the shop without her morning tea, and without learning what is happening, or rather has happened, the media having a cunning knack of turning what is already past into a never-ending present. Then she is rebuked by the teacher at school for bursting noisily into the classroom where everyone is crouched in front of the television, watching as if hypnotised the endless replays of the hijacked plane slicing like a blade through the metallic butter of the building.
Valentina joins the audience and empathetically experiences the horror of the poor souls on board the plane to a greater degree than the horror of those in the tower. By Valentina’s lights, it is better to die of a plane crash on the ground than in the air, and worse to anticipate death than to never wonder what hit you. You can tell at once that the world has changed. You can go outside and hear it; in fact you can hear it inside. It’s the silence of shock, then the low murmur of incomprehension, later the rising hum of indignation. Finally the sabres are rattling all over the world — it brings to mind a stupendous army of Orcs. Valentina might not be sure about the difference between Catholics and Protestants but any fool knows about the age-old problems between Christians and Muslims — you only have to hear the word crusade to be reminded. Unfortunately Mr President has just used that exact word to describe his righteous vengeance.
After poring over the newspapers, Susan Halifax visits Mother-in-law. But Ngaio doesn’t want to talk about world events. There comes a time in old age when you lose interest in everything beyond yourself. If your relations are lucky, it is only a short while before the end; if not, they must suffer dutifully. Thus Susan Halifax endures Mother-in-law’s long and rambling monologue which, on this particular day, consists of the painstaking recall of how lonely she was as a child, how she came home to an empty house every day after school because her mother was out playing bridge and her father was a travelling salesman. One of those desolate men in cheap suits dragging suitcases of books all over the country, or was it brushes? Susan doesn’t really listen and can’t remember. Next she must study the old photos Mother-in-law always wants to show her.
Susan looks closely at the photos of Mother-in law’s father — Poppa everyone called him. She catches something in his expression that makes her feel chilly. But what’s in a photo — we’re always caught at the wrong moment, and trying to smile at your relatives is always the wrong moment. Maybe that’s it: Poppa doesn’t even attempt a smile, permits solitariness and disdain to wholly envelop him. Susan can just imagine him in the small bleak towns with his battered suitcase, housewives purchasing the toilet brushes or out-of-date encyclopaedias just to get rid of him, terrified behind the afternoon blinds that he’ll come back and slit their swanny throats. Or come back, please God, and slit open our cotton dresses because, good Lord, what a handsome man he is. Even with the white hair and pruney skin of age Susan can see it.
‘Where’s that nice photo of Poppa when he was younger, Ngaio?’ she asks.
Mother-in-law springs up with alacrity in spite of her bad back and bad leg and goes to search for a photo of Poppa in his prime. It’s amazing how much younger she suddenly becomes when you become a conspirator in her endless regress. And how quickly she can lay her hands on the photo when she routinely claims never to know where her purse or reading glasses are: ‘Can’t you find them for me, Susan dear?’
‘Here’s one,’ Ngaio says. ‘Here’s Poppa at twenty-five — oh and here’s Poppa’s father, Pater. Completely different, aren’t they — you’d never guess they were father and son. Pater’s the one who came on the boat, of course, the Oriental, only a babe- in-arms he was, born during the crossing. Imagine that, giving birth on the high seas with all that dirt and disease and a menagerie of filthy live animals on board!’
Susan scrutinises the photo. It’s not the one she meant, but there’s twenty-five-year-old Poppa, still unsmiling, not even looking directly at the camera, looking away to some private paradise or horror, small-town ladies with their knickers down and throats cut. Pater beams broadly outside his butcher shop in the main street, looks right into the camera too — too far in — as if he’s trying to see its workings. Is that why Poppa’s evasive, because Pater was always looking right inside him? Susan sighs. The twists and turns of families get so tiresome. Pater stares, Poppa looks away. Who wants to discover, as we all inevitably do, that we have been moulded by an interaction we were helpless to avoid?
Susan hands the photograph back to Mother-in-law and says briskly, ‘You should get out more.’
‘What for?’ Ngaio asks querulously, and before Susan can say life, Mother-in-law folds her hands in her lap and adds, ‘I can’t, I’m busy.’
‘Busy doing what?’ Susan asks, trying to sound interested and reasonable.
‘Busy remembering,’ Mother-in-law replies. ‘Remembering my life. I’ve had quite a life, you know.’
Yes, Susan thinks, quite a life wandering from the washing line to the kitchen. Not quite a life in fact. The life, however, that Mother-in-law would wish upon all her daughters and her sons’ wives, the certain path to happiness, for your children if not for yourself, and Susan wonders why children unquestionably deserve so much happiness and then suddenly lose the right to it once they have grown up.
With half-suppressed guilt, Joe Halifax increasingly leaves the burden of his mother to his wife. He’s too tired for his mother’s recriminations, for her endless interrogations concerning his health, for her medical tips and home cures. He’s too tired to be told that he’s tired, that he’s working too hard, that he’ll work himself into an early grave; that having extensive life insurance because you sell it isn’t an excuse for killing yourself for others who haven’t thought, who have fallen short, who are stupidly willing to risk it. ‘Not a risk that I’d take,’ Joe tells them with grim humour, sweating out the sale under plastered-down hair, too hot in always-overheated living rooms. ‘I’d never take a chance on surviving life.’
He’s so convincing in his death-horror they buy up his product as if it were powdered amaranth and they too could live for ever just by sprinkling it on the furniture. How could they have been so foolish as to think they might get their fair share, their four score and ten? More likely they’ll wake up dead in the morning. Joe drives home after another successful scalping. He could drop in to his mother’s house to hear he’s pale, that he’s putting on weight, just look at that puku, and isn’t that speck in his eye a melanoma — but doesn’t. The trouble is he can’t say firmly, No, it’s the mote in your own eye, Mother, so take it out.
Instead Joe persuades Dolores to visit her grandmother more often. But Grandmother doesn’t approve of Dave. ‘Find a nice boy, dear,’ she advises, as if boyfriends came with signs round their necks — this one nice, this one not nice — so that a nice girl might choose correctly instead of becoming confused by her own ignorant assessments. And what are we to measure niceness in men by, anyway? Sexual self-restraint until the wedding night, at least until the purchase of the real estate, a willingness to support you all the days of your life despite your gradual metamorphosis into a frigid shrew? Or, as Dolores sees it, not being of the same world as the rest of us, a weak desire for sex and diminished capacity, an even lesser desire for nourishment, and the wan aboulia that goes with both.
So he is a nice boy, Dolores thinks, walking back home, and what would Grandmother know — her brain’s addled from a lifetime of white flour and aluminium cooking pots. No, Dave’s the one for me, Dolores concludes, I simply can’t abide all the aggression that goes with eating meat. Dave’s not at all aggressive, he has a beautiful and serene soul. The soul of a quadruped ruminant, Uncle Joe says, but at least no one has tried to stop me seeing him, and they shan’t.
On the other hand, Joe doesn’t like it when his niece allows Dave to remain in the house while she goes to pay her weekly visit to her Grandmother. God knows what he might get up to — he’d better go and check him out. Joe wanders down to the kitchen where Dave is rinsing something impossibly inedible with bottled water. ‘Kia ora,’ he murmurs with his habitual phoney serenity, but Joe doesn’t answer, is too startled by Dave’s eyes. Joe watches Dave continue his lustral rinsing, a process so laborious it’s like washing clean all the dirty souls in purgatory. He wonders what it is that’s so alarming about Dave’s eyes, thinks it might be the hallucinatory sheen of semi-starvation, or perhaps a thick opacity caused by consuming the milk of paradise, or simply that his food is slowly poisoning him.
Joe watches Dave making and drinking his special soup, boiling up a pot of freshly gathered, obsessively washed and caressed grasses and weeds without stock or seasoning, and straining it straight into his wooden bowl.
‘Wouldn’t you like some bread with that bats’ broth?’ Joe asks.
